Current State of the Game

[Ashterz]

As one of many who pre-ordered the game and has been frustrated with the initial launch, I have been following the subsequent developments as closely as I can and I thought a summary for those that have not may be helpful.



How does it run?

There is not one answer to this, especially due to the huge number of possible hardware configurations that comes with PC gaming, something that traditional console developers do not have to deal with, and will continue to be a learning process to many studios porting games to PC.

For many, as displayed by the negative reviews, it seems the game is unstable, with many crashes and stuttering. There is not one single reason for this, and largely this is due to the game not being very well optimised.

As with everything despite all of the blame being thrown around, the truth is a combination of things.

There are without a doubt many issues here, the game is not well optimised in it's current state. Those with top end hardware, will have the performance headroom to deal with this, and some will mid to lower end hardware will find the game does not meet expectations and will be more greatly effected.



Have there been any updates?

As of now the game has had two patches:

- 1.0.1.5 [feedback.naughtydog.com]
- 1.0.1.6 [feedback.naughtydog.com]

The above patches have addressed a few of the initial concerns, but has not addressed all of them, and certainly not for everyone. As a result Naughty Dog have tweeted to suggest that the next small patch will be with us on Tuesday 4th April 2023 and with a further, larger patch being released later the same week.

There has also been some public acknowledgement from Nvidia [www.nvidia.com]on the crashes for 30 series cards. It seems they may have some work to do, but have not said anything about a new driver or other updates.



What Should I do?

That's up to you, at the end of the day, you have payed good money to play this game, and you have a right to be upset that it did not meet the expectations that were set.

Refunding it where possible is of course one option, and so is leaving a review.

I personally am awaiting a number of patches to experience the game properly, but I also wanted to provide as much constructive feedback as possible.

In an effort to do this I wanted to share my hardware configuration and my personal experience with the game in the event that may help others with similar specs or issues. Or even better it may help Naughty Dog and others working on this, identify patterns and other problems.

Also, there is a report dialog box that comes up when the game crashes. This is valuable to the developers, and the more information we can give them, the faster that can find solutions and patch the game, to reflect the game we want to experience. So ensuring you provide as much information when reporting will help.



My Specs

Running at 4K with a target of 60 FPS using DLSS performance.

i7-9700k
Gigabyte Z390 UD
32GB DDR4 3600
RTX 3070 Founders
Game installed on SSD



My Experience

I have found the patches have made a minor difference, but nothing substantial. I did find the micro stutter has been greatly reduced, and given that it would crash a lot more frequently, pre-patch there have been improvements even if small.

I find that for the most part I have been able to sustain a stable-ish 50-60 FPS with mostly medium settings, having turned down some more CPU intensive settings, and a couple of the heavy VRAM ones.

I have had plenty of crashes however, some being GPU crashes, although I cant say how many were as a result of Nvidia drivers, or the game.

One of the issues I know is still present is v-sync does not work, unless I turn it off and back on again each time the game loads, which includes respawning.

So whilst the game is semi-playable for me, I want the best experience I can, so I will likely wait for each patch and try the game until I feel comfortable I can have a good enough experience to make me happy. But that is subjective.

I completely appreciate that as a fan of the game and studio, I am willing to wait for issues to be resolved. But I do not represent anyone else, and you should continue to express your own feelings on the game and not be swayed by others.

I truly hope this game gets the attention it needs and gets updated to reflect the experience that many of us have already gotten to enjoy on previous generations of the game.

Thank you Naughty Dog and those working hard on the game. Whilst I am frustrated with the fact the game is in the state it is, and that I have had to pay first and play later, the work being done is seen by some and appreciated.

Please do the right thing, and make this experience one that new players will remember in time for good reasons, rather than bad.

[Butchingo]

I run the game at 1080p@60fps on a base 2060 6GB, Ryzen 5 5600x, 32GB RAM on medium settings. Game is absolutely fine if you don't push your hardware